It’s not so much that Nerds (actually — I prefer “Geek”, but that’s just me!) are picked on. Since the rise of the computer and the Internet, it’s cool to be a Geek again. I knew a lot of “jocks” in school — and I earn three times more than any of them, I have a nicer house, a better car, a happier marriage and more successful kids than any one of them. That’s more than adequate recompense for the bullying and teasing that I endured. Now I get to pick my friends — and if you aren’t able to keep up an intelligent conversation, you ain’t one of them!

So I’m reconciled on that score.

The problem now isn’t that the geeks are suffering — it’s that science is suffering. It astounds me that there are global warming denialists — that such an ungodly number of people deny that we ever went to the moon…they ignore science when it’s inconvenient. But find one (long-discredited) study that purported to show that vaccinating your kid is a bad idea — and people latch onto it with ferocity.

What we lost through the belittlement of the geeks was the general public’s willingness to look at the evidence (“Sorry — tl;dr!” being the most common response) combined with the distrust of those who ARE willing to look at it. The consequences of that go beyond any possible suffering of Nerds and Geeks — and enter the realms of the death of children from ridiculously-easy-to-prevent diseases and the large-scale destruction of our planet from willful ignorance of CO2/Methane pollution.

Even among organizations that claim to believe in this stuff — they refuse to follow the trail of scientific evidence — working so hard to save pathetically small amounts of CO2 by switching to LED lightbulbs while continuing to fill the atmosphere with methane produced by all of those farting/belching cows.

So — morn not the geek — morn instead the passing of The Age of Science.